/vr/ - Retro Games

Yes, I'm sure lots of people did? It was a pretty popular game.

>>4605890
I was a beta tester for this.

>>4605890
i played during luclin.

>>4605890
I did. I was 9 so all I remember is running around Halas and black burrow as a barbarian

I only played during Kunark, in summer of 2000.
But I started playing on Project 1999 last month.

I did. It was neat at the time because there wasn't really anything quite like it on that scale at that point. Then again, it was tedious. Like if you died you might have to run all the way across 3 or 4 zones (with no gear/armor) just to loot your corpse. Expansions really shitted on it in all the worst ways, and if you try to play the current version it's a disgusting mess

>>4606271
Started with kunark here too. I don't think much changed mechanically from the original though

>>4607174

no it was the Luclin expansion that really fucked it all to shit

Kunark and Velious were more true to the style of the original game

>>4607180

I disagree about Velious. Unlike Kunark, Velious focused on making its content feel like it was in a linear line in terms of overland zones. In order to get to Western Wastes you had to travel through three dungeons and 4 overland zones. Compare that to Kunark's overland zones that usually connected 2-4 different other overland zones thus giving you various routes to choose from. On top of this, some overland zones were small or lacked content like Cobalt Scar. And while Luclin had its problems, at least it was varied in art design and how each zone connected. Big problems with Luclin came down to how half of its content felt unfinished and that raiding was over the top fucking hard to complete with them using artificial difficulty to make endgame raids difficult.

I've never played it. As someone who was a big fan of western/computer RPG's back then, is it worth checking out today? Is there any other game you can compare it to?

>>4607718
>Is there any other game you can compare it to?
World of Warcraft mixed with heroin

>>4607718

> is it worth checking out today?

Because it's an MMO, the current version of EQ is nothing like it was back than. There has been over 22 expansions and it's a convoluted mess.

However, there is Project 1999 which is an emulation of the original Everquest and its first two expansions.

>>4607784
I don't really get the point of projects like that. A big part of the appeal of EQ was that the game was constantly changing with every update. With something like that, you know exactly the state the game will be in at every point in its timeline and at the end the game just stagnates.

Would be more interesting to see a project that tries to expand the game while maintaining the classic feel in terms of mechanics and stuff. Also, fixing broken shit instead of autistically maintaining it just because it's "classic".

>>4607827

That's a very valid point and one of the flaws of the server I have issues with, especially when they keep game breaking bugs in at earlier stages refusing to fix them until it's "fixed" in the original timeline. Nevertheless, the population of P99 usually has 1000-3000 active players any given time so it's enjoyable.

On top of this, there is debate on whether to add additional content. Hopefully it does occur.

Project 1999 is a museum.
There are other private servers that do things differently.

We could make our own Project /vr/ server with blackjack and hookers

No but when I was 13 I saw the game box at Electronics Boutique and thought the skimpily dressed girl on the cover was cool.

>>4607784
The other reason is that the kind of shit that people were willing to tolerate in 1999 in order to have a compelling online game experience was way higher than it is today. It required massive amounts of grinding. Death incurred a very substantial penalty in XP loss and threat of item loss if you did not recover your corpse. If you let a mob run away, odds were high that in a minute or so you'd get hit by a train of enough mobs to insta-kill everyone in the group. And that was virtually every dungeon that wasn't over-camped. Most classes had a very limited array of abilities and you were forced to cooperate with other players to accomplish nearly anything.

High-end raiding was not elaborate scripted encounters. It was just: here's a fucking dragon with stats off the charts and AoE damage and AoE fear. Good luck faggots.

Part of that was because the gaming culture itself was much less mature. Certain aspects of MMORPG gaming were fun because hardly anyone had ever played a game like that before. Coordinating tank, healer, DPS, and crowd control in a 6-person group was an accomplishment in 1999. In 2018 it has just become a part of the MMORPG cultural DNA.

>>4610714
>Coordinating tank, healer, DPS, and crowd control in a 6-person group was an accomplishment in 1999. In 2018 it has just become a part of the MMORPG cultural DNA.
I take it you haven't played any MMORPGs lately.

>>4610724
Heh no... Not since 2005 probably.

>>4605890
yeah. I was one of those salty lads who refused to play WoW. I even played the PS2 game that no one even remembers existed.

>>4610902
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-CHG_To7Ag

>>4610714
>a whole post of bullshit
Wolfshead is the last word on mmos. Just take your pick http://www.wolfsheadonline.com/?s=penalty

>>4610902
I played on it. It's great to see that there is a group of die hards actually trying to bring it back. All from save state data no less. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VKSn7-hn_c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYg9QSgYpTI

>>4611567
Great site except that World of Warcraft was at least an order of magnitude more successful than Everquest. Perhaps it was a mistake to bring up the death penalty since people fixate on it so much. Yes, he's right that EQ's death penalty is an important part of its risk/reward proposition and the feeling of gratification when you succeed. But risk-aversion also leads to boring, repetitive gameplay that maximizes safety over everything else. It also led clerics to be massively over-valued for a non-combat ability that requires absolutely zero skill to use(rez).

PvE competition is another example. One reason EQ felt like such a compelling alternate reality is that you had to share everything in the world with all the other players on the server. There was no instancing and no sharding. Everything you did had consequences to everyone else. That added a richness to the experience that games with instancing simply could not match. However, there's a very heavy cost to pay for that. You wind up with weird emergent social behavior in over-camped zones-- rules about who is allowed to kill which spawn and no real risk since everything is killed within moments of spawn. Success doesn't require any skill at playing the game itself, it simply involves waiting on a list until your turn to join the right group comes up. You wind up with a pareto scenario where top guilds always consume all the best raid-level content leaving no chance for anyone else to even make an attempt.

People put up with that in 1999 because there were no other options. And yes, this forced them to appreciate the positive aspects of ruthless mechanics. But as soon as something came along that emphasized the gameplay itself over the rewards and punishments (World of Warcraft), most players abandoned EQ.

>>4607709
The linearity of Velious was great in that it made the remote zones feel truly remote. When you were in Western Wastes, it really felt like you were far from any kind of civilization.

Luclin, on the other hand, felt very small and made the existing world feel small too due to the Nexus.

>>4610902
There is a project to try to revive the game server from a couple of packet captures and save states. If any codefags out there can help that would be great...

>>4612609
I've been following it for some time I was going to mention it for that anon up there.

I never got to play it sadly because I was too busy being a FPS nerdlordburger and rarely strayed away from that genera.....

Damn young me sucked.

I just reinstalled this game and logged in with my old character and couldn't maintain 60fps with a 1050ti and 8700k. Promptly went to uninstall and could not because of some error. I literally can not remove this game from my system.

>>4612727

>>4612742
just look on google, it's a common issue for people not able to uninstall. Also, the fact that the game has no vsync setting in the options and you have to add it manually in a text file pretty much tells you all you need to know.

>>4605890
I started playing a few months before Kunark launch. Was a silly little 14-15 year old kid who bought the game because of elf titties.

I made a Paladin. A god damn paladin. A mother fucking human paladin on some shitty gateway.

I remember spending days hunting in EC, then nightfall hit and spent nights in freeport selling, banking and looking for upgrades and sitting waiting for Dawn. Always did stupid shit like logging out in Inns only.

Didnt read the manual and used /shout to communicate with people in my group, didnt know lay on hands was a day long cooldown and remade my first character because of that because I didnt think it was ganna come back.

blahblahblah, first hell level, ages passed, a summer lost

yaddayaddayadda wow landed, im sitting alone in PoK waiting for the other raid force to log in to kill Quarm

ectectect, came back for a steam sale and lost a few hundred dollars in that damn card game they had

then found p99 at some point in this, lost another 5 or 6 years as a bard/druid/chanter. made fucking bank years as a bard and chanter PLing people and realize once you have about a million plat and nothing to spend it on because you know better not to roll a hybrid or warrior and able to farm your own gear you think about your life and how many years was wasted on this one, single, game.

To be fair, one single game, six thousand games. All in all they are all a waste of time

>>4612439
The nexus wasn't as bad as when pop came out. I lost a lot of revenue on my druid taxi service when it launched

no need to play this with uo existing.

>>4605890
skeletons were too spooky

I caught wind of it just before it was released and got it.. let me tell you, it was a fucking insane feeling those first few days/nights

The feeling of actually being inside a virtual world with other people was like WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE

I never got into hardcore endgame back then and didnt even really play past the first expansion but very very few games could ever pull the level of feels that EQ did on release, it was special, I still fucking think about when I hit level 7 or whatever and could solo Fippy Darkpaw before he made it to the gates

>>4611920
>no one has ever reverse engineered a console-based MMORPG before

Except, you know, FFXI. And tons of multiplayer games that aren't MMORPGs. And also the fact that being on a console is not really any different than being on a PC. And also the only thing you're reverse engineering is the network protocol, the server code isn't reverse engineered in any sense of the word, it's just written to simulate the behavior of the original.

>>4612830
PoP was when I left the game. I know a lot of players loved PoP for its great raiding, and I'll admit I had some great times exploring when it was first released. But to me it felt a bit too much like a theme park tacked onto the actual world, that also trivially reduced the size of that old world.

But still, Luclin was the beginning of the end.

>>4613439
That's really interesting to know. With a skilled team of 3 to 4 guys how long do you think it would take them to handle the whole protocol thing?

You will never explore The Hole and walk past dozens of dead players on your way to the top of the castle again.